


spooky action at a distance

by somethingdifferent



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, and before u ask no the title does not mean the plot is spooky scary, it’s some kind of physics phenomenon that the author knows nothing about, man go bar man meet lady man take lady home man insult lady, this is a short story i wrote in college and it’s basically reylo read it if u r so inclined, this is the plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:34:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25022476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: “You weren’t kidding about the mess.” Suzy grinned, and he tried to smile back. “Jesus.” She flipped through his applied physics textbook casually. As he watched her, Mark was painfully aware of how he had scrawled his thoughts in every inch of the margins. Yellow post-it notes that stuck from the sides flapped when the fan in the corner of the room turned to where Suzy stood, strands of curly black hair lifting and falling around her head.“Could you put that down?” Mark said abruptly, and across from him Suzy started. He opened his hand and closed it again. “Please.”
Relationships: Original Character(s)/Original Character(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	spooky action at a distance

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to 2017 jane who wrote a short story in college and realized three years later that it was reylo. have at it

Mark was almost drunk. He’d had a few at the bar, and there was a girl sitting across from him that he normally wouldn’t have been able to talk to, and why not? He walked over to her, careful where he placed his feet. He hadn’t gone out drinking that often when he was in New Jersey, but after moving back to California he found himself at a bar more often than not. He didn’t know anyone that well yet. So, he thought, why the hell not?

“Hi,” he said, smiling widely and not quite correctly. He could feel that his mouth was working too hard, like his teeth were shifting in the wrong place. Mark knew this was impossible; there was a part of his brain telling him this. The other part, the irrational side of him worsened by alcohol, still worried about it. “I’m Mark.”

The girl, who was looking at him with confusion written over her face, responded after a long pause. “Suzy,” she said, sounding almost wary.

Suzy had dark hair and much darker eyes. He felt unreasonably that her eyes were intelligent. Like they saw more than his did. There was no real reason for him to think this: it probably wasn’t true anyway. Her nails, tapping rhythmically on the bar, were painted bright red, and her lips, tilted around the straw of her drink, were the same color.

“Buy me a drink?” she said, and it didn’t sound like a question.

“You already have one,” Mark said, gesturing. “Why should I buy you another?”

“Don’t be cheap,” she laughed, her red mouth open and smiling. Her teeth, he saw, were perfect.

Before the first drink was finished, she gently suggested they go somewhere else, somewhere quieter. When they were in the cab, she looked at him expectantly, as if waiting for his cue.

After a long moment, Mark gave his address.

He thought suddenly of something as he looked at her, her hair lit up from the lights of the freeway, her full, red lips almost crimson in the dim glow. In his first and only fistfight, a long time ago, he had broken his hand because he threw a punch wrong. The fight had been behind his high school, in front of a wall built from not-quite-beige cement blocks. Mark had been able to feel his pale knuckles crack against the other boy’s face, both of them flushed and damp with sweat. He had worn the cast like a badge of honor for a month and a half, assured that it was a sign of his ferocity.

He thought about how he had opened and closed his hand after it healed, over and over, checking the muscle and bone to make sure they hadn’t atrophied. He couldn’t even remember how the fight had begun – only that he had been the one to start it.

“So,” Suzy said. She glanced at him, some of the confusion from earlier sneaking onto her face. “I guess this is where I ask what it is you do?”

“Oh.” Mark thought about it for a moment. Normally, he avoided thinking about his job after hours. “I do consulting.”

She paused for a moment before responding. “And…what’s that like?”

“It’s okay.”

Suzy stared intently at him. For some reason, Mark wanted to flinch away from her gaze, but he didn’t. “Do any interesting things?” She paused. Let the silence carry a weight. “Meet any interesting people?”

“Not really,” he said slowly, turning his eyes away from her to look at the seatback in front of him. “It’s nice enough. Sometimes it can be tiring. What I do is not very challenging.”

“Well, what do you think is challenging?”

“Honestly?” He shifted in his seat. “What I did in school was a lot tougher than this.”

She cocked her head. “What did you do in school?”

“Astrophysics.”

Suzy raised her eyebrows, seeming surprised. “Does everyone who works at the – your office have a degree like that?”

“No,” Mark said, smiling slightly. “It’s not a requirement.” Mark took some measure of pride in that, that he was one of the few people in the whole building with a semi-respectable degree.

The night air was warm when they stepped out of the car. Mark’s building, made of silvery steel and glass, was nothing too special, in his opinion. Good for a starter place. In the garden there were a few avocado trees, the fruit ripe and heavy as it hung down on the branches. A light turned off in one of the rooms, and then on again. Mark turned around to see Suzy looking up, her eyes traveling the length of the building and then higher.

“You can see the stars here,” she said.

Mark glanced up, impatient. “Are you coming?”

Suzy nodded, and she followed him, past the lobby, up three flights of stairs, and to the door of his apartment, where he fumbled for his keys.

“It’s a bit of a mess,” he said when the key finally clicked in the lock. “I should have tidied up.” The last part he said mostly to himself, muttered under his breath. He hadn’t had the chance to really clean in a long time. When he wasn’t absorbed in one of his books, he was usually on his way out, or otherwise too occupied to get any housework done. When his mother had last visited, she told him that he should hire a weekly maid.

His front door led into a wide space, eerie in the darkness. The only source of illumination came from the large windows that stretched almost from the ground to the ceiling. The city was glowing yellow and white, and every once in a while there was the sound of sirens somewhere far in the distance. A leather sofa dominated most of the living room, and, beside it, a glass coffee table was smothered by the things Mark had let pile up there. There were tall piles of books and magazines teetering under mugs and silverware, and his laptop lay open at the edge, right where he’d sat down to read an article hours earlier. Mark shut it on his way past the table, wincing at the plates he’d left out long after he’d used them.

“So,” Suzy said, “here we are.”

“Yes.” He felt like he sometimes did just before he figured out a difficult problem, not quite knowing the steps needed to pull it apart. For a moment, he couldn’t decide what to do next. He settled on asking, “Can I get you a drink?”

When he came back from the kitchen with a glass of wine in each hand, Suzy was meandering around his living room, reading the titles of the books he kept stacked in haphazard piles, running her fingers over their spines. She picked up a textbook from the top of his water-stained coffee table, and Mark wanted to bark at her to put it back down. He took a breath and pictured his lungs expanding and contracting. He set her glass down on an old copy of  _ The New Yorker _ that was already covered in wrinkled rings.

“You weren’t kidding about the mess.” Suzy grinned, and he tried to smile back. “Jesus.” She flipped through his applied physics textbook casually. As he watched her, Mark was painfully aware of how he had scrawled his thoughts in every inch of the margins. Yellow post-it notes that stuck from the sides flapped when the fan in the corner of the room turned to where Suzy stood, strands of curly black hair lifting and falling around her head.

“Could you put that down?” Mark said abruptly, and across from him Suzy started. He opened his hand and closed it again. “Please.”

“Alright. Don’t worry, I’m putting it down.” She left the textbook on the table and backed away with an exaggerated gesture of defense, her hands up and steps too large.

“Just don’t touch the books, okay,” he said. He touched the bow of his lips, a nervous habit. Behind the bottom row of his teeth, there was a steel bar corralling them into order, preventing them from moving again. He imagined Suzy growing up with those straight, white, perfect teeth, and he grimaced. Even if she read it, really read through every word, she would just be one more person to find nothing in the pages. Rachel, his ex-girlfriend, who stayed in New Jersey after finishing her doctorate, had certainly never found any of it interesting enough to discuss with him.

Suzy’s face twisted, only for a moment, before she smoothed it out. “Hey, relax. I was just looking.”

“Sorry,” he said stiffly. “It’s a pet peeve of mine, people looking through my books. It’s not your fault, I wouldn’t have expected you to know that, but that’s just how it is.” He was babbling, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Maybe if I knew you better, it wouldn’t bother me so much. All things being equal.”

She was quiet for a moment. “And how are they working out for you? I mean, your books.” She tilted her head, indicating the texts on the table. There was a mug halfway full of cold coffee sitting on his copy of  _ Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics _ , the cover beaten and torn. “You said you have a degree in…astrophysics?”

“Yes. A Master’s.”

Suzy settled on his sofa, and she didn’t appear to be getting up anytime soon. Mark could tell he was sobering up, and he was anxious suddenly. It had taken more alcohol than usual before he could even talk to her, he had actually managed to get her back to his apartment, and now she was doing nothing but talking. Even worse, talking slowly. Most people do, he admitted. It wasn’t until he had begun college that he realized they were thinking and speaking at a normal pace, and that he was the one moving too quickly.

Mark was born, his mother had told him, during a drought in California, when the trees in their garden grew oranges half the size of her palm and the grass sprouted up already shriveled and brown. Everything leaned the wrong way then, it seemed, and everything grew up crooked. Everything, she had liked to say, except for him.

Suzy nodded, her mouth turned up at one corner in a half smile. “That’s cool. That’s really, really impressive.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. He liked to think that, through practice, he had become adept at humility.

She crossed her legs, uncrossed them, and his eyes tracked the movement. “I really don’t know anything about physics. But I read something – it’s hard to remember. It was about this thing where these guys split a molecule, and – and they did the same thing at the same time across the room.” She gestured in midair with one arm at nothing in particular. “The two halves of the molecule.”

“Electrons,” Mark corrected.

“What?”

“The article you might’ve read – the researchers entangled two electrons for it. And they were almost a mile away, not across a room.”

“Oh.” Suzy looked sheepish. Her shoulders bent inwards, towards her chest, as if someone had tightened a string there. She smiled tightly before she continued, this time softer, less certain. “I read about it a while ago, you know? The details are kinda… I only remember it because of what the article said it was called: ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Isn’t that great?”

Mark nodded, waving his hand as he sat on the couch next to her. Suzy’s legs were crossed away from him, her purse a makeshift barrier between them. “Well, enough about physics,” he said. “What did you study?”

“I didn’t go to college.” Suzy must have seen something in his face, in the way he was suddenly looking at her. She crossed her arms, defensive. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, of course not.” He thought about how slowly she spoke. This was the only thing he could think, and it repeated in his head over and over. “Of course not,” he said again, as if that might make it true.

“You’re giving yourself away.” She pointed to his face, red fingernail clear in his vision. Mark looked at her closer now, noticing things he hadn’t before: the scuffs on the toes of her shiny heels, missing beads in the details of her dress, how the nail polish on her right hand wasn’t quite as perfect as it was on her left. “You think there’s something wrong with me.”

“That’s not –” He didn’t finish the lie, changing tack instead. “I only mean to ask, why not go to college?”

“Things just never came together. The money.” Suzy snorted, lifting her shoulders. “Not that it matters to you. Astrophysics. What do you even do with that?” As she spoke, she stood up, and Mark quickly followed her. In her heels, she was nearly as tall as him. Mark supposed she bought them from somewhere like Payless. Rachel wouldn’t be caught dead in heels like that. Suzy pointed to the books on the table, like they were the ones she was accusing. “Your whole job, the whole ‘senior consultant’ bullshit you get paid six figures for. All you do all day is tell rich people what to do with their money. Fire this person, build here, pollute there, make this conveyor belt go this way. What’s the point? Why not try and do something important with that fancy degree?”

“It’s ‘try  _ to _ ’ not ‘try  _ and _ ,’ it’s ‘try  _ to _ ’ and – and –” His brain, still a bit sluggish, was working to catch the error he was missing. He furrowed his eyebrows. “And how do you know about that?”

Suzy paused. “How do I know about what?”

“About my work. All I said was consulting.”

She stared at him, and as she did, Mark thought of Rachel back in New Jersey, Rachel who wore a Burberry coat and carried the Farragamo purse he had bought her in the crook of her elbow. He thought again of the fight he had started in high school, and the fact that he couldn’t even remember why he started it, and the fact that his parents had given no thought to the cost of the hospital bill when the doctor reset the bones of his knuckles.

“You really, really don’t recognize me?” Suzy said. Her voice was quiet and small. She sighed. When she spoke again, she sounded very tired. “I work in your building, Mark. I’m a receptionist.”

He blinked. “Oh.”

She shrugged, seemingly indifferent, but he could see how she picked at the hem of her dress. Mark looked away, choosing to watch the glasses of wine they’d left untouched. “I thought if we kept talking then eventually you’d recognize me, you know. I guess not.”

Mark didn’t speak; anything he could think to say was caught in his throat. He felt as if something had lodged there that he couldn’t get out. Before he could figure out the right words, solve the problem she’d given him, Suzy tucked her purse underneath her arm and walked to the door. With her shoulders back, black hair tucked behind her ears, she looked much prettier than he’d initially decided.

“I’d like some money for the cab,” she said when she stopped at the door. It was not phrased like a question, so he did not take it as one. Silently, he fished his wallet out of his slacks and put two wrinkled bills into her waiting hand. Suzy made a fist, crumpling the money under her red fingernails.

“For what it’s worth,” Mark said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize –”

“It’s not very much,” she interrupted. “It’s not worth very much.”

After a pause, Suzy opened the door and left. Mark watched her as she walked down the hallway, the fluorescent lights overhead jarring his eyes against the dimness of his apartment. As she moved, her purse slid slowly off her shoulder, falling first to her elbow and then to her palm. The bottom of it dragged across the tiled floor. She didn’t seem to notice, and she did not try to lift it up again.

Even once she’d left, Mark stood in the doorway, staring at the empty hall. After a long moment, he went back inside. He took both still-full glasses of wine from the coffee table and threw them into the sink too roughly, the hand-blown glass cracking into pieces.


End file.
